After a season away following the departure of co-founder Piotrek Panszczyk, Area returned to the schedule with an eagerly anticipated debut by Nicholas Aburn, who until recently was working at the Balenciaga couture studio in Paris.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about how the most fun part of going out at night is the getting ready chat—that feeling of ‘anything can happen tonight,’” he said earlier this week at his studio. “And it would be great if you could make people feel that way about getting ready in the morning.”
Well, it was 10:29 in the morning when the show began, and everyone in the room definitely felt like anything could happen when the first model walked out. She wore a slim cotton sweatsuit with cropped cargo pants over a tank with an extra long and extra sparkly zipper pull that could have stood in for a necklace, except she was also wearing a necklace, fashioned like a hoodie drawstring, bedazzled in silver and wrapped around her neck like a lariat. It was as jarring as any of the more conceptual looks that have graced the Area runway in the past three years, yet it also made perfect sense. After all, the brand first made its mark in New York ten years ago with cool girl party clothes.
“I think the collection just needed some of the toughness of girls in New York—but New York is also the uptown lady,” said Aburn. Last month the Area Instagram account reintroduced itself by posting an old ad from the famed New York nightclub that is the brand’s namesake. “When you see pictures of the nightclub, one of the things I love the most is the mix of these really avant-garde Leigh Bowery types, with some really banal or underdressed people and then another woman sitting there with massive jewels. That encapsulates the weird tension of being in New York,” said Aburn.
Soon enough the sparkle appeared; in tiny skirts and cropped bandeau tops made from those very same bedazzled drawstrings, seemingly gathered, wrapped and tied around the body, and then later in a more chaotic style of tangled strings of crystals (a bustier mini-dress worn over a sweet cotton-eyelet trimmed bra immediately read as Life of a Showgirl-ready). Denim has always been a big part of Area s offering, and here we had long and lean jeans with trompe l’oeil layered jorts on top, wide leg jeans with slashes on the knees and legs that exposed a black satin or bedazzled lining, and the piece-de-resistance, a miniskirt with a bow on the front made by tying the two pant legs together. It was so well-constructed that for a second it looked like they had somehow managed to make it from a regular pair of jeans. “I really, really wanted to, but it’s slightly different,” Aburn explained. “We got pretty close.” He expects the skirt to go into production.
Elsewhere a pair of dramatic architectural gowns in royal blue, American red, and yes, denim, showed off his red carpet bonafides (his first job after graduating from Central St. Martins was as a VIP designer at Tom Ford). “The brand is associated with this party ‘thing,’ but I was like, ‘how can we look at ‘party’ differently?’ After we’ve been through this sportswear period, what does dressing up again look like?”
The most exciting pieces were the ones where Aburn merged the two: a shrunken royal blue satin hoodie worn with a black silk long skirt with an undone tuxedo belt at the hips; basketball jerseys spliced together into dresses and covered in clear sequins; the dramatic evening Mac coat. “I just think an evening gown Mac is such a sick thing,” he said.
It is Aburn’s “open to whatever attitude” that made this collection a standout. As the show progressed, the marching band soundtrack got louder and reached its crescendo as models stepped out in “gowns” made entirely from colorful tinsel, larger-than-life silver sequins, and confetti galore. It was simply joyful; the cherry on top of a confident debut that brought a sense of fun—dare we even say whimsy?—to New York fashion.
